Modi's party poised for win in India's biggest state

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party is set to retain power in the country's most populous state, according to early results for the closely watched election in Uttar Pradesh.

The results could set a trend for the general elections in 2024, according to analysts. It also consolidates the rise of Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk turned politician, who has been the state's chief minister for the past five years, they say. He is being increasingly spoken of as a potential successor to Modi.

The BJP was leading in about 260 of the 403 state assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh, with the party ahead in enough seats to retain power, according to the update by the Election Commission of India on Thursday.

The state's legislative assembly has the highest number of legislators in India, given its population of more than 230 million people. Ensuring victory there is the biggest prize for any political party in India. The state also sends the most legislators to the Indian parliament.

Adityanath, 49, is the most-talked-about chief minister in the country, and is likely to become the first chief minister of Uttar Pradesh to be handed a second five-year term.

Hundreds of BJP supporters had begun to arrive outside the party's office in Lucknow, the state's capital, even before the poll update was announced. Jubilant party supporters began dancing in the streets and celebrating across the state.

"I am so happy that the BJP is winning. They will give a push to Hindutva," said Amit Pandey, a 25-year-old law graduate who wore a T-shirt with an image of Adityanath and a saffron-colored scarf. He was referring to the BJP's Hindutva ideology of reshaping India along explicitly Hindu religious lines. "Our life as Hindus will change," he added.

Elsewhere in the country, results showed that the Indian National Congress party could lose power in Punjab, one of the few Indian states where it still held power. The Congress also trailed the BJP in the smaller states of Goa, Uttarakhand and Manipur, where polls for the state assemblies were held over the past month along with those in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab.

The Aam Aadmi Party, which controls Delhi, is now set to form a government in Punjab as it is leading in the state's assembly polls by a big margin.

Political observers believe that party's supremo and chief minister of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal, has emerged as a prospective national leader and challenger to Modi.

For decades, Uttar Pradesh was a stronghold of the Congress party. But it has been unable to retain power in many crucial Indian states over the past few years. The party, which had held power for most of the period since India gained independence in 1947, has continued its rapid political decline, the results of the 2022 state polls show.

"The result is being viewed by the Indian public as a midterm referendum on (Modi's) rule, in particular on the Hindu nationalist agenda of Modi's BJP," said Sanjay Rao Ayde, head of the political science department of St Stephen's College in New Delhi.

Despite heavy criticism from many quarters for poorly handling the COVID-19 pandemic in Uttar Pradesh, where the state's health system collapsed during the second wave, Adityanath is now set to retain power comfortably because of welfare politics and as law and order has improved significantly over the past five years, according to many political analysts.

The writer is a freelance journalist for China Daily.